Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Search This Blog

Pages

A Confession

I got my start in journalism when I was fifteen and a sophomore in high school on the school paper. I’m sure you’d all agree that I’ve come a long way since then. But in today’s column, I want to tell you about my first story assignment on that paper. It’s weighed heavy on my mind for a long time and I decided I could no longer continue bringing you stories and opinions until I cleared the air.

“But it was a long time ago, and in high school,” some of you might say, but this is truly the most honest thing I can think to do.

My editor then was a young man named Alex Gedicks who passed away shortly after his graduation a year later. He was a good editor for a seventeen-year-old kid, fair minded with a flair for what would get students to read papers. It was the knowledge of his skill that made me resent him slightly when he passed down my first story assignment. “400 East,” he told me, “you know the road that leads to the front parking lot to the school? Why has it been under construction for so long and when is it going to be finished?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, not comprehending that this would be my first story.

“Find out. It’s going to be on page three in this weeks paper. You’ve got till school’s out in three days.”

The school bell rang and I went home, terrified of my deadline. I didn’t even know the first place to start. I made a few calls to the city works but never got further than a secretary. I suppose at that stage in my life I was too timid to work the phones although I certainly grew into it over the years.

Two days went by and I had gotten nowhere. My homework had piled up in all of my other subjects and getting to the bottom of the road construction had managed to slip it’s way down to the bottom of my priority list.

I needed to turn a story in and I hadn’t talked to a single person and I hadn’t done the research. So I did what any fifteen-year-old kid does when he has a book report due on a book he hasn’t read.

Which is to say, I made it up.

I fabricated quotes and everything. In the story I had gone to the city and found that the delay had to do with budget constraints and then I went out and interviewed the workers on the road.

“We’re gonna be burnin’ the midnight oil on this one to get ‘er done on time.” These were the actual words I put in the mouth of a construction worker I named Fred Hollenbeck.

I turned in the story and all anyone said was, “Good work.”

The story was published and I’m assuming no one who knew otherwise had read it because no one ever seemed to notice any of the problems in it.

Thinking back on it, that story was as good as any to start with, it’s something I could have sunk my teeth into today, despite its seeming innocuousness. But I didn’t. I fabricated what should have been a news story. I learned from there, I never did it again. I felt so guilty about it I made doubly sure to check all of my references and sources afterwards, sometimes to a fault.

Perhaps that’s what high school newspapers are for, though. Journalists like myself can make those mistakes there instead of here, where things truly matter. Had I made that mistake today or at any point during my professional career I'd be blacklisted. I'd never work at a paper again, but maybe this really is the purpose of high school papers.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

We're going to break down another scene this week, and it's one of my favorites in cinema history. It comes from the ending of City Lights by Charlie Chaplin, which I think is the greatest romantic comedy ever made.
It's a touching film from 1931 and I would make it mandatory viewing for anyone who wants to learn to tell a story.
The scene we're going to be breaking down comes from the very end of the film, so if you haven't seen it, I don't want to spoil it for you. Go watch the film. You can rent it for $3.99 in HD on Amazon or for free on Hulu with a free trial or plus subscription. You should just buy the Blu-ray, though. You're going to want to revisit it.
For those of you familiar with the movie, or for those of you who are going to ignore my pleas to watch it and go ahead with this post anyway, I'm going to set this clip up a bit before you watch it. City Lights tells the story of Chaplin's Tramp and how he falls in love with a blind flower …

It's been a long time coming, but I think an upgrade to my web presence was long overdue. I began this blog in 2005 and it's served me well over the last 13 years. My goal in those early days was to write a short story every month. Back then, that was the only writing I was doing.

This website, then called "Bryan's Short Story Corner," got me into a regular writing habit. One that I still maintain today. I hoped it would help me get eyeballs on my words and, looking back at some of those early short stories, I shouldn't have wanted any of those eyeballs looking. Today, my Patreon fills that void. There is a dedicated group of supporters there that help subsidize my ability to write short stories on the regular.

After I started publishing books, this blog morphed into a place to talk about my projects and writing and it worked well enough for that for a long time. But now I have Twitter and Medium for those functions and they have much cleaner and easier inte…

I have twenty or thirty notebooks and journals filled up with snippets about writing, my plans for stories, bits of dialogue, interesting ideas, plotlines, scraps of short stories, and a dozen other things. I carry one with me at all times and it takes me a couple of months to fill one up.

One of the things I've kept in one of my notebooks was a collection of writing tips and rules that I've collected over the years in my travels. From teachers, from books, from wherever. Most of my career has been spent screenwriting, so a lot of these are most applicable to that, but I wanted to present them so they might be of use to you as well.

I've never stopped collecting these over the years and I never will.

To start the list are Kurt Vonnegut's eight rules of writing. They are the first in my notebook and, I think, the most useful. I'll add a star to those I think are applicable most to screenwriting. Some of these aren't applicable to everyone in every situation, but…

About Me

Bryan Young works across many different media. As an author, he's written the bestselling comedic novel Lost at the Con, and the critically acclaimed sci-fi adventure Operation: Montauk. As a film producer, his last two films were released by The Disinformation Company and were called “filmmaking gold” by The New York Times. He’s also published comic books with Slave Labor Graphics and Image Comics. He’s a contributor for the Huffington Post, StarWars.Com, Star Wars Insider and the founder and editor in chief of the geek news and review site Big Shiny Robot! He's also the host of the popular podcast "Full of Sith."